I first discovered Karen Garthe’s work when she read for a series in the West Village of Manhattan in the spring of 2011. Her poems struck me then—and even more now—for how swift and layered they are. They swerve with the physicality of the images they grip, and yet one can always see and hear something else going on behind the swerve, something that says “come on in for a stint.”

Garthe is a writer who rustles knowledge—all the frayed and filmy experience of her decades in NYC rattle on the tip of her tongue—and thus to be near her writing is to be positioned in the places we feel we’ve lost sense of: the side street we prefer to walk down because we know there is a magenta cornice shining behind a lopsided elm; the lean of an old proprietor upon the checkout desk of a small business that has since vanished; our favorite step or stoop to sit and think upon. In her work, the debris of conversation and sight sparkle into focus.

When I sat down with Garthe in her apartment in Queens, NY, the evening had already been somewhat of an interview—you’ll see how Garthe starts throwing questions toward me, a sly tête-à-tête—and thus much of what we discuss was not even recorded. But what was, and what is transcribed and heard here, is a reminder of the kind of active thinking that carves a rich Garthe poem.

So much has happened since our meeting in December. The New York Garthe knows so well has disappeared, furthering the goneness we discuss, and since Garthe lives at the doorsteps of Covid 19, and has been sheltered in place for months, silence and noise have alchemized; and yet there is something new and beautiful to celebrate in both Garthe’s responses and the new poems of hers, published in this same issue.

Garthe is the author of four full-length books: (vagrant (one) in thin air, collaboration of poetry and collage, forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil; the hauntRoad, Spuyten Duyvil 2018; The Banjo Clock, University of California Press 2012, and Frayed escort (Colorado Prize, 2005), as well as the chapbook Cafe between wars, Red Glass Books 2014. She lives in New York City.

Cheers, Tyler Flynn Dorholt

May, 2020

GARTHE: You know what I would like to do to start? I’d like to show you my reading stack (Garthe gestures toward the books that are literally holding up the video camera). From the bottom: The Education of an Idealist, by Samantha Power, who was Obama’s U.N. person; The Biography of Debussy, by Stephen Walsh; Pseudo-Dionysius, who was a theologian; God and the Astronomers, by Robert Jastrow; Garbo; Sophocles; The Four Cardinal Virtues, by Josef Pieper; The Sweet Flypaper of Life, by Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava; and Farewell to the Horse, by Ulrich Raulff.

DORHOLT: So this is what you mean when you say you’re a magpie reader?

GARTHE: I think I’m interested in everything…except maybe math and wine.

DORHOLT: I’m not very good with math, but I do like wine. Do you organize? Do you know where the things you need to pull from are?

GARTHE: I do. I have the book I started today, Out Stealing Horses, which is a refreshing change after reading Descartes and Kant for a couple of weeks for my class. I have Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, which is something I plan to read in the next couple of weeks, along with Karen Solie’s The Caiple Caves, a stunning new book.

I audited a course at General Theological Seminary called “Philosophy for Theology,” a survey course from the Pre-Socratics through Hegel. It involved a lot of reading from a wonderful textbook The Voyage of Discovery, and particular reading of Augustine, Descartes, Cappadocian Fathers, Hegel.  I always felt that philosophical writing was very hard to read, but I’ve sort of developed a muscle for it. Not always “getting” it but appreciating. Apprehending, perhaps. It’s not that different than reading poetry; you just have to be okay with being lost. I love being lost. You stick with it because it’s compelling. It’s beautiful so you stay. When you read a poet you’re participating in that poet’s head, in their vision, right? When you read a philosopher you’re participating in that thinker’s thought.

DORHOLT: I’m interested in your ideas in connection with poetry and philosophy. Would you argue—and this is part of my own argument—that in philosophy there is a clearer attempt at getting something across than there is in poetry?

GARTHE: Not necessarily. It depends on the philosopher and the poetry. What I would say is that you can read and re-read a couple of paragraphs and they’re sort of like fish rising from the bottom of the pond, making themselves visible in the darkness. Philosophy is scintillating intellectually, but also wearying. There is no image, no sensuality. Super rationality is fatiguing after a while. So, you go the distance from thrill to fatigue…at least I do. Of course, a fabulous instructor can animate all that and bring interminable dryness to life. At the seminary I was lucky to have brilliant instructors. One in particular, Fr. Clair MacPherson, is simply one of the greatest people walking the planet – mind and soul. 

DORHOLT: Of course there are poetic philosophers and philosophical poets.

GARTHE: That’s true. For instance, we all know there’s beauty in poetry, in some poetry  because there’s all kinds, including the deliberately Unbeautiful (also consider the eye of the beholder). There’s all kinds. But there’s beauty and elegance in philosophy, too. Descartes’ meditations are sublimely elegant, they really are. Whether or not you agree with Descartes’ conclusions, you have to admire his elegance…he’s as elegant as math!

DORHOLT: I’m interested in the separation—and though it doesn’t need to be this—between philosophy and theology. I think those things have been separated, even though they come from the same brood. I think about Kierkegaard here, and faith, and I guess I’m wondering who have been some of the philosophers who have spoken to you in terms of what they’ve cared about?

GARTHE: I enjoy cruising around a bit in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I came to appreciate ancient church fathers like Gregory of Nyssa who rather than a doctrine of Original Sin (forwarded by naughty but reformed Augustine) maintained a doctrine of Original Grace. I like Gillian Rose, a contemporary philosopher who died of cancer some years ago, who converted to Anglicanism on her death bed. Her philosophy book “The Broken Middle,” and her less scholarly, very powerful little (huge) books “Love’s Work” and “Paradiso.”  I’m sure she and I were stomping the same ground here in NYC in the 70s, and I’m sorry I never met her. I adore the brilliantly and formidable contemporary theologian, David Bentley Hart. But let me be clear: I don’t have a philosopher’s mind. I’m not acute in that way. But I am fascinated and engaged. At a cocktail party a few weeks ago, I saw some friends I hadn’t seen in a very long time. They asked me what I’ve up to, of course, and I told them I was volunteering for a national breast cancer helpline called SHARE that’s support groups were indispensable to me when I was being treated. I thought it would be wonderful to give back. I mentioned I was taking the Philosophy for Theology class when somebody gave me a wry look and said “What for? What’s the use of that?” In the first place, that’s a pretty strange thing to say to a poet, don’t you think? I mean, generally, we’re not a very utilitarian bunch. I answered that when I was about 7 years old, I had a medical procedure, was anesthetized in an antique way with a gauze mask and chloroform. I was lying on the table, the doctor on one side, my mother on the other. I remember coming out of the anesthesia, drifting back from wherever you go, returning to consciousness. I saw my mother and said Now, will you tell me why we’re here? Taking such a course decades later, is absolutely consonant with my question.

DORHOLT: So then tell me a little about when and how you came to poetry.

GARTHE: I think I came to poetry as soon as I learned to read. I had A Child’s Garden of Verses “how would you like to go up in a swing in the air so blue/ oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing ever a child can do” (an eternal truth, no?).  Poetry was company. It still is. All these books are company, these voices, thoughts, attitudes and visions talk to me. Talk to me. Please.

I was a tortured suburban child from a prosperous suburban family.  Sitting in my room reading poetry saved my ass, so naturally, I wanted to write it. I had this idea that if I wrote poetry I could save somebody’s else’s (which remains to be seen). I like all kinds  of poetry—I like experimental poetry and very traditional poetry; I like clever and profound poetry, sentimental and silly stuff, too.  I adore language, and as I think I’ve said before, I understand things quickly and like most the things I have to work at. I enjoy not “understanding” in the way we usually mean. Which is not so different from enjoying being lost (up to a point, of course). Somebody once asked me in an accusatory, not particularly nice way “Well, WHO are you writing for?” I answered that I’m writing for whoever enjoys reading me, whoever enjoys keeping company with me, take it or leave it. I’m not campaigning, converting, evangelizing, selling, promoting, or convincing. Extremely self -indulgent of me, I’m sure.

DORHOLT: It is rare for poets to like many different kinds of poems, I think. There’s an allegiance, sometimes, to the kind of work that made some writers write, to the things that are being written around one person, physically, so to have this kind of panoramic view seems to sustain its worth a little bit longer. It’s making me think about when you first came to New York City. You were dancing then, right? 

GARTHE: Right.

DORHOLT: How would you then say dancing and poetry work together?

GARTHE: You’re getting to something as you’re talking that makes me remember how important music is to all of this. When I was young I had wonderful teachers in the schools I went to. Really astonishing teachers. They exposed me to things at a very early age. I was a 15-year-old Arnold Schoenberg aficionado. Classical music (including new music) is probably what I listen to most, and I realize now that that is probably because for me dancing, studying classical ballet is where I began. I like other music, too—I like to put on Vince Gill and polish the silver. I love the Carter Family, Joni Mitchell, Sonny Landry, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the jazz musicians who converse with their instruments. Language is music. My work is scored, a picture on the page. The key to reading it well is musicality albeit of a sometimes fragmentary, complex sort.

DORHOLT: I would say that musicality is one of the most noticeable things in your poems, but not necessarily for how they would sound aloud, but for the space that’s created between words, the form: they almost look like notes at times; but that’s much different than what we might say musicality looks like in poetry.

GARTHE: Like meter and rhyme.

DORHOLT: Yes, I’m not thinking of meter and rhyme.

GARTHE: The poems are scored on the page like compositions. The words move on the page.

DORHOLT: Yes, and I’m intrigued by the dancing stuff because it’s almost like a poem can become one small, practiced, swift move in a larger concerto, and that some of your poems have that stamping impact, like they can still one part of the movement, still one part of a musical being. There is something dancelike about that. Tendons.

GARTHE: Often I feel like, I imagine myself, a free creature moving in space and the poems may reflect that. They may belong to the air.

DORHOLT: But with the free creature moving in space, I think of how constellated your work is. I feel like, as an observer and writer, you are seeing those constellations. With poetry there is a choice to include and exclude. How, then, have you moved into nonfiction over the years? What things about you as poet are essential to nonfiction?

GARTHE: Image making, probably. I only came to essays and nonfiction because I was invited to. I would write Cal Bedient, my first editor, long emails. Years ago, Cal took about 20 of them and cobbled them together into a Letter from New York for his journal, Lana Turner. Ben Lerner usually wrote it, but said he wasn’t able to do the next one. Cal asked me and I said I couldn’t and he said “yeah you can. . .I’ll show you,” (what a lovely moment for me) and he assembled those emails brilliantly and sent them back whole — an essay for a final edit. A while later he wrote me “you know, I just read an article about this performance artist, Narcissister, and I’m wondering if you would take a look and write a piece about Narcissister for Lana Turner.” He gave me all the information about where it was—he’s in California—so one day I trekked to the Lower East Side near Essex Street where there are lots of  new little galleries and found the Narcissister exhibit. On the first floor were posters of Narcissister, a woman with a Barbie Doll body who is always masked and posing in different scenarios. Narcissister doesn’t assume personas like Cindy Sherman, she is the same ad nauseum, facilitating her own objectification with no small amount of irony, practically rejoicing in it. The idea was interesting, novel. There was a protracted video downstairs in a pitch-dark basement – naked Narcissister in occasionally naif but mostly sexually graphic scenarios. It was dark and other people kept coming down. There was some kind of couch thing and it was so dark you could only see the silhouettes against the screen of the other people around you. It was clever for a minute, but then boring since there’s only one idea iterated over and over again. At one point sitting there I felt something really bad came into the room, something ugly changed the air and I got up and left.

I thought “Cal is having his fun with me asking me to write this piece about Narcisssister. He’s messing with me: “Okay, Christian, deal with this!” But Christian has had all kinds of friends in her life, including pornographers. Not the people who enjoy porn, but the people who make it. Who for themselves, don’t enjoy the porn or any sex much at all. So, the porn part didn’t phase me, but the exhibitionist part did — as did the savvy moniker “Narcissister” (as intended). I just started writing stuff down. Downstairs in the dark I couldn’t even see the words I was scribbling. When I walked upstairs out of the darkness and left, I walked up Essex Street and made a right on the Bowery. Walking north on the Bowery, I saw these bundles, people who looked like bundles almost imperceptibly moving. I saw a whole column (it’s very cold out) of murmuring bundles against a wall, and realized it was the Bowery Mission, that the bundles were people waiting in line to eat. The juxtaposition of a Narcissister with men who are hungry was and always will be irreconcilable. Two kinds of empty: empty belly, empty soul.  So, that’s how I started writing essays. It’s Cal Bedient’s fault.

DORHOLT: And now, if and when you’re reaching back to things, to your experiences in New York City, is it the image that keeps allowing you access? I mean, have you kept journals? What brings you back into the moments?

GARTHE: I kept journals and diaries ever since I was a little girl. Then, at some point I stopped and the only thing I wrote was poetry. You know, you keep a journal and you’re a teenager and you’re like “I don’t think she likes me and I have a crush on this him” and it’s all about you  and after a while you’re not so interested in yourself in that way, but in the world. You know, anything can prompt a memory, anything at all – a smell. A song. An image. A flicker. Somebody you pass by on the street who reminds you…. Anyway, a flock of ghosts keeps me company. Some I knew and some I never met. Even the two of us right here, are in crowd, don’t you think? I have my flock and you have yours. There are quite a few of us in the room!

DORHOLT: I agree that anything can prompt memory. What’s fascinating to me in seeing artists work with recollection is that there’s either an embrace of it (with a push to expand upon it, to create something out of it), or the kind of moment of recognizing it, recognizing the wonder or significance of it, and keeping that unsaid. So what you mention about how the emails you wrote became a part of the nonfiction is a testament to being open and giving with conversation and life, whereas others might just try to make what you wrote in that email a piece of writing already. So I guess my question in this is, do you feel like you recognize the possibility of your epistolary correspondences to become something that more people will read? 

GARTHE: Who’d want to read all my young nonsense? That only happens when you become famous and academics build their career on your life. I did recently read an old journal from 1975 when I was in the Village – in the thick of it. In fact, in the thickest of thick. The journal was interesting because other than the ubiquity of my own broken heart, I had lots to say about that world, about what I saw and the people I knew. Reading this old journal I saw that writing about things narratively was something I was good at, even then. In retrospect, I’m sorry I didn’t have more confidence, didn’t put myself out there as yet another viable voice in the wilderness. I didn’t have the connections to do that. I could have forged them, but didn’t. For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a book about New York City in the 70s and 80s. Watching Manhattan devolve from the varied and creative place it was to this half dead mall, has been a terrible trauma for all of us who have been here for a long time. It’s like watching your world burn or in this case, turn frigid, turn to ice. I walked down a section of Lexington Avenue that I used to live on that I hadn’t been to in a long time—the lower 30’s and late 20’s. Everything was gone, emptied out. In preparation, of course, to be razed for yet another zillionaire condo with a street level of dreary corporate chains. Food chains, retail chains, discount chains that have rendered a dynamic and utterly singular city into Anywhere USA. I’m approaching The Old Print Shop, wondering if it’s still there. As I get closer, I see so much garbage on the street in front and think oh, no, it’s been gutted, it’s gone…but it’s there. Eureka! While I’m looking in the window at Ben Shahn prints  this guy comes up and says “I really like the one in the middle” and I say “I really like it too” and he says “I can’t believe what’s happening to this neighborhood” and he and I stand there, and he’s been in the city for a long time and I have and the two of us are grief-stricken together, ranting and consoling one another over the loss of our environment to this relentlessly corporatized chrome, steel monied world. What’s happened to New York isn’t normal evolutionary change, but what happens when nothing’s left except petting a bottom line. It’s tragic. And it’s complete.

DORHOLT: There is a certain level of goneness. Like you’re walking through bruises all the time. What I’m noticing is that whereas there are more people, more things, bigger loads of money and bigger understanding of all these things, there are more absences, more gaps to slip into, and this is dark matter. Even in the last two days, wandering around the city, I’ve felt like I can’t feel.

GARTHE: Not being able to feel is how the psyche protects itself.  That’s why I say that even the ghosts are gone. There’s not much left worth haunting.

DORHOLT: Where do they go?

GARTHE: I don’t know where they go. That’s my other big question. Maybe they go to Rome.

DORHOLT: Why Rome?

GARTHE: Because Rome is a place of past, present, and future. In Rome “no being goes into nothingness.” Rome is the supernatural concord of then and now. The best and the worst humans can do, have done, is palpably there. And as a friend said Rome is where the membrane between heaven and earth is thinnest. 

DORHOLT: Okay, so what is your New York then? Of all the places you’ve lived or the places you’ve spent time at, what are they, what is your New York City?

GARTHE: Walking down a street in New York City 20 years ago, there would be a camera store, a dress shop, a bakery, all of these individually owned enterprises. Not franchises. Now, when you walk down the same street – where once there were windows to look through, there was stuff to see, it was varied and it was interesting. Now, when you walk down the street, from beginning to end, all you see are knees. Knees at the counters of fast food stores, juice bars, whatever. The whole street is redundant with food shops and people sit on oncology-chic stools at a counter jammed right to the window…and they eat their food in your face. You watch them chew instead of musing my what a beautiful Nikon, or what’s that or I wonder what’s in there? All is generic, predictable. No surprises except sometimes sticker shock. I moved to New York when I was very young. I was 18 and I lived at the Yon 51st and 8th and I met all of these people who were much much older than me. I don’t know what I lived on or how I survived, but I obviously did. I was taken under the wings of painters, musicians, singers, actors, dancers, theater people who were very sweet and indulgent of me. They showed me everything and I remember being wide-eyed, and hungry for all of it like I was starved. I had a sustained and sublime apprenticeship. Manhattan was my university. I moved through all different worlds, different groups of people and each one gave me more keys to the kingdom.

New York was always about money but the arts were intimately up close. Now, though, planet money has eclipsed everything and the arts, shoestring independent entrepreneurship and creativity are in a paler remote orbit. Financial sleight of hand, financial shenanigans have gobbled the world. So the New York that I knew— well, say you are in Midtown and you need to kill some time…you could go to Gotham Book Mart or a book store or a record store or a stationery store; you could go browse quietly in a thoughtful place. All gone. Now, if you want you can go sit in a church. They’re still there. Otherwise it’s handbags and watches.

There’s no place left to not be a consumer of seemingly unquenchable appetite. Sure, in a bookstore you might buy/consume a book and in a “record” store, a record or CD, and in a sheet music store (entirely gone), the score of a musical or an opera. You can say, of course, that one consumes these things too, but they are qualitatively different than, say, yet another handbag or down vest. The bookstore had its own sacred culture. Not only were you prowling a great midst of writers, thinkers, artists; you were with others doing the same in a sort of meditative collective. And once upon a time in an antique land, the people who worked in bookstores were not just clerks who fetched and rang the register, they were knowledgeable – sometimes super knowledgeable about literature. There was expertise. You could navigate translators, translations with them. They’d calibrate the differences and advise you about which translation of The Brothers Karamazov is best…and for what reason. In a bookstore, in a music store, you were within culture. The whole idea was to browse and wander…no arrival, final destination in sight. Meander…twirl. Being in a bookstore was an infinity, not a goal oriented curbside pick-up of chicken in a bucket. Music stores the same. And also, any shop that’s merchandise was actually touched by human hands. If you pick up a beautiful object, a vase for instance, you marvel at its craftsmanship and think about where it came from and the person who made it. You just do. But swimming in this great sea of stuff upon stuff — handbags, watches, scarves, shoes, whatever – unless they’re quite precious and therefore prohibitive, you’re not looking at craftsmanship but at cheap and probably desperate labor that cranked it out for you in God-knows-what working conditions for pennies somewhere on this grievously imperiled globe. If inclined, if informed enough, you can ponder the container ship it came over on under the avalanche of glow-in-the-dark sneakers. 

DORHOLT: You have a fondness for churches. Tell me about them.

GARTHE: I, personally spend a lot of time in them, but as far as this fantastic diminishing of a great city goes, my spending time in churches is not the point. Religious, meditative experience isn’t necessarily what most people want. They want New York to live up to its repute as the standard bearer of Culture high and low. Culture you inhale just being here. There was something everywhere, something for everybody. (The joke used to be that New York is the place where you can find anything and anything can find you.) It is culture high and that has relinquished to products, brands, bells and whistles of consuming. With spectacle as a defense against feeling. Existential dilemma is so quaint by compare.   

DORHOLT: How much of the poetry you’re reading and writing these days is a continuation of the writing you’d say you do. Tell me about poetry for you, as of late.

GARTHE:  Prose puts one foot in front of the other, generally. You can make it sparkle, make it whatever you want but it’s labor. Poetry is invention, completely different. I start to write something and I think it’s awful and I think, “oh my God what am I doing.” I always start with an image or idea, with a notion of control. And then as I go along I lose control. In a delicious way I surrender willfulness and that’s when the poem begins to live. It takes me where it wants to go. I almost disappear but at the same time, I am the agent and I’m doing this…so the challenge is to take the ride, to not lose faith and stick with it even when I have no idea of where it’s going. Even when I’m stuck or caught in one of those sort of, well, dead spaces. As you well know, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. I had a friend who wanted to write poetry so she wrote something every day, she practiced diligently as though she were at the barre. I think it’s antithetical to poetry to write every day like that, like it’s a muscle to flex and exercise. Being creative is like a field that flourishes sometimes and that sometimes must be allowed to remain fallow…but not for too long. Part of writing the next poem is being quiet until you get there. Which isn’t to say it’s not a practice, but is to say that there’s and ebb and flow. Only when you’re young do you work by ecstasy, by inspiration which is almost always love, right? It’s STILL love – but with time, love expands its forms.

DORHOLT:  Is love a form? Or, if it takes many forms, can you tell me about a few of those forms in your life? 

GARTHE: Maybe the reason Joni Mitchell only recalls love’s illusions and really doesn’t know it at all is because she’s only looking at Both Sides like a coin when love probably has an infinite number of sides and  moves in and out of forms mutably, constantly shaping and re-shaping while remaining, while keeping solvent. Pretty good trick, huh?  It’s constantly challenged and threatened, isn’t it? But love is the engine of all things, is it not? The angel of all things? Aside from feeding and housing ourselves, keeping physical intact, love is modus operandi no matter how bumbling, feckless or failed. Personal love is dilate and thrilling and puts a spring in your step. But loving the North Woods or the Bay of Naples is true love, too…loving your kids, your friends, some fascinating new person…your dog, your messy house, your frayed towels, your own flawed person –.not to mention that palm tree you’ve been working on for 87 years. And there’s agape — love and charity toward mankind. Loving God…God loving you.

DORHOLT: There’s a specific version of the encyclopedia these forms will someday fill.

GARTHE: Maybe it’s there already. Written in barely visible ink.

DORHOLT: What you say about having a measure of control and losing it is a really good way to talk about how poetry differs from prose. I often start with a loss of control knowing writing will perhaps give me control, and I’ve also thought about entering the poem as a place where I am not present at all; I have agency, but since I gave myself to that place I didn’t exist within it. It has me thinking about how we negotiate the difference between writing and thinking and writing as feeling. It goes back to some of what we were discussing about philosophy.

GARTHE: I’ve said before that I think thought, itself, is a form of feeling. There is passion in thought.

DORHOLT: It has a specific impact and physicality, thought?

GARTHE: Yes, I think it does. In my experience it does. I’m not a gushy or emotive person and many of us still think in terms of a mind/body split (though less and less). We separate thought and feeling which not separate at all. I feel that thought, itself, is a type of emotion. Abstraction can be big-souled, you know?

DORHOLT: The times that you want to articulate things, what’s lovely about that is that when it alchemizes, the poem is taking the essence of the feeling you were trying to articulate and making it something different for someone else to pick up and carry on.

GARTHE: You’re turning it into an object. You might as well be making that vase. Another thing that’s fascinating are the people who at the drop of a hat, say, at a table with a group of friends can make a brilliant toast and say the most exquisitely perfect thing. That is awesome. I could never do that. The people I’ve known who can do that are almost never writers, curiously. In fact, they’re usually drunks.

DORHOLT: And yet people are always trying to come to the writer and say, “why don’t you give the toast.”

GARTHE: Right.

DORHOLT: And the writers just start to quote other writers. Writers don’t give their first new goods, they say things like “well Mallarme once said …”

GARTHE: Or Beckett: Try again. Fail again. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

DORHOLT: You know for years I tried not think about how much I was thinking or feeling when I was writing, and now thinking about that consumes me. I feel like there are entirely different poets within myself as a poet, ones who deal with those things differently.

GARTHE: Do you feel any struggle with value? In terms of struggling with the value of poetry in the world that we’re living in.

DORHOLT: Yes, in this way in particular: I am not a person who believes that one needs to write in order to speak to or support or provide opportunities to change the culture. And yet, the writing that does do that makes for a more noticeable value and impact and becomes a certain kind of thing …

GARTHE: Yes but what did you say about Timothy Donnelly?

DORHOLT: I think the wonderful transcendent ability of what I would consider to be a great poet, like Donnelly, is that they are not specifically thinking about how the content and distribution and the form of their work is going to impact or change something, it’s that they are not leaving anything out in their poetics, so they are inherently doing good work to add value to everyone who receives it. So Donnelly, for instance, there is something about this sweeping and web like contract of this through that grabs everything, brings everything in, and then says, “here are the things” and it’s all there. You can pick and choose what part of that has value for you, but it doesn’t leave things out. So, to answer your question, I’ve struggled with the value of some of the work I’ve done because it doesn’t get near to speaking to things or people. To value-identified things. Now that I’m a father I know that a lot of my work speaks to fatherhood. It’s because I’m living that and so I’m aware that the value of it in relation to fatherhood could have it allowing others to find value in that.

GARTHE: Do you think your writing is your scaffolding?

DORHOLT: Sometimes I feel like it is maybe providing markers and paths and fence lines away from my home and structure. It’s mapping out a bit more into the distance the places that my thinking can be structured. Away from the self as opposed to inside the self. Some of it feels like scaffolding. What about you: what do you think about it in terms of value?  

GARTHE: I’ve never worked in a “confessional” vein, have rarely used the pronoun “I” in my poetry. That’s a kind of stance. On the other hand, I do take on personas. And of course, all personas are me. In this world at this time I’m finding personal testament really valuable. Personal witness seems so very meaningful now. Donnelly has that big catholic gift. But then take someone like his colleague, the late Lucie Brock-Broido (for whom Donnelly orchestrated one of the most inspired memorial services you could imagine), her work is not catholic like that at all; it’s like Meissen porcelain made out of language. Her poetry is a work of art.

DORHOLT: The writer Stephen Kuusisto once told me that when poems get to a certain length for him they stop being poems, they become nonfiction.

GARTHE: That I understand. Hmm…my poems are getting longer. In fact, I think some of them might be, uh, short stories.

DORHOLT: But the part of that that’s most interesting to me, is that depending on the ways in which we write, these things can change.

GARTHE: Isn’t the difference between a poem and an essay or a short story, form? And can’t form hybridize?

DORHOLT: That would be a good place to start.

GARTHE: I think so. A poem is a form. I tend to invent my own. But the poems are definitely formed. They cohere and are not just stream-of-consciousness run amok. In the end, of course, every single one is a love poem.

DORHOLT: You should read a few.

GARTHE: This one is called “Putnam Valley.”

DORHOLT: That’s kind of a longer one for you, isn’t it?

GARTHE: It is. And then there’s a poem that hard to read. It’s called “middled in THE SENDER” and it’s got like five voices in it. Let me see if I can read it.

GARTHE: That poem was written in memory of Newtown.

DORHOLT: Hearing that makes me think about the idea of value. The reach and potential of a poem.

GARTHE. I wrote this poem for Newtown after watching an American Masters program on John Lennon, …after listening to his song “Mind Games,” a song meant to be heard at 2 am in  an empty airport terminal. (Like Elton John’s empty airport song from the Lion King Can you feel the love tonight….) This poem howls. It has the whirlwind in it and finally coming out of the whirlwind are “Cinnamon” and Eyebrite” from the Book of Job. Restoration.

DORHOLT: I’m headed to the airport early tomorrow, so I’ll put it on.

GARTHE: (laughs). I’ll read one more.

 

Garthe reads “angel boots”